Alison Gropnik of The Scientist In The Crib claims that babies, especially toddlers, are like little scientists who constantly experiment with the way the world works. That’s why they’re always dropping spoons, smearing things on the wall, trying to provoke you with bad behavior and so on.

I took this video of Owl interacting with a new toy that I picked up at a swap meet. In under 5 minutes, I counted 14 separate scientific experiments, all unique, although some were repeats of previous experiments but with a new variable being introduced. It’s adorable and fascinating all at once. If you have a few minutes, check it out:

[vimeo vimeo.com/41460908]

If any of you have kids, I’d love to see 5 minute videos of their play. How many experiments can you spot? Post them on your blog, or in the comments here, and encourage others to do the same. Let’s observe the scientists at work!

Babby’s sleeping patterns are so unpredictable that I always feel blindsided. When (as on Sunday night) he sleeps soundly in three hour bursts, and nighttime disruptions are minimal (fuss, nurse, conked out again in moments), I’m like “WHAT DID I DO RIGHT??” and when, as in last night, he refuses to stay asleep for more than half an hour to an hour at a time, I’m like “WHY????”

I can’t find rhyme or reason to it.

It isn’t how much solid food he has in a day, because before last night’s disturbed night he gobbled fish sticks and green beans. It isn’t how much milk he gets, because he was on the boob all night last night. It could be the amount of nap time in the day, because he had slept surprisingly well yesterday afternoon, but then he has had just as disrupted nights that we have blamed on overtiredness due to LACK of napping during the day.

It feels like a crap shoot.

If you’re wondering how my no-cry-sleep-solution training is going, the answer is: haltingly.

Because the kid keeps getting colds.

Every time I start the pop-him-off-the-boob-before-he-falls-asleep program, I notice a difference within 24 hours. Longer, more sound sleeps. It works. Problem is, I never really manage to advance the program because then the crafty kid comes down with a cold and can’t sleep because he can’t breathe and I abandon any sleep training out of desperation. When it’s the sixth wakeup before midnight, you just don’t care anymore.

JUST GO TO SLEEP. HERE, HAVE A BOOBA. HAVE ALL THE BOOBA.

A week later when he’s breathing well and no longer sneezing snot bubbles onto my nipples, I have to start from scratch again.

According to this American research study, people perceive breastfeeding mothers as being less competent than other people. They are less likely to hire someone whom they know happens to be a breastfeeding mother.

What’s more, this bias was equally distributed between men and women – which means that other women are also less likely to hire a breastfeeding mother.

The weather is too miserable to go for a walk. I wish I had a way of wearing Babby on my hip or back. He likes to be carried but it’s hard for me to get anything done around the house when he’s hanging out front like that.

Thought:

Maybe there are more ways to tie the Sleepy Wrap. Hip and back carries.

After a visit to Youtube:

Apparently there are! Must try some of these.

One very cranky baby and a lot of failed attempts later:

Hmm. This wrap seems too stretchy for these ties. It may be worn out, or naturally too stretchy. I wonder if there are used wraps on craigslist that might be a tighter material?

A visit to craigslist ensues:

Wow, these things resell for almost retail price! I don’t have 40 bucks to spend on another wrap. I like my wrap fine, but I want different carries. Also, I do wish I could have something super stylish, like this:

But that’s over 100 bucks. That’s a ridiculous amount of money when you think of the fact that most wraps are just long pieces of cloth. Maybe I could just buy cloth. Can I do that?

Google “make my own baby wrap”:

Apparently so! Wow, these sites claim I could buy fabric for my own wrap and get a new, less stretchy one for five bucks. I wonder if there are any fabric stores around here…

Google fabric stores in my area:

Hey, they have cloth prices online! Let’s see what a cotton jersey knit would cost… 15 dollars a yard?! At 5 yards of wrap, that’s pricier than my brand name wrap! WTF?

A phone call to my mother later:

Okay, my mother is going to check her local fabric store for more reasonable prices. I’ll have to send her these links about making your own wrap. Hey, here’s a new one. Rebozo. What’s a Rebozo?

After some Internet research:

…Rebozos look awesome! They’re like pashminas that also carry your baby! I like the bright colours. Stylish and useful! And they’re shorter than standard wraps. That would be good. I could get a non-stretchy fabric for a rebozo and keep my stretchy Sleepy Wrap and then I’d have two different kinds of carrier!

Thought:

I have a pashmina. I’m sure it’s too short, but I should check.

Thought:

Where IS my pashmina?

Thought:

Seriously, where the hell did it go? It should be with the scarves. Why is it not with the scarves?

…Perfect Husband came home to find me ransacking the coat closet and threatening to tear the house apart because I’ve misplaced my pashmina. He convinced me that he has not stolen it for his own nefarious purposes and that it will turn up.

When you have friends who are also parents, things can get awkward when parenting philosophies clash.

I have known since I was a teenager that I wouldn’t let my baby watch tv, and that I would use a diaper service, and that I would carry my child in a carrier instead of lugging around a car seat, and that I would breastfeed. They didn’t even feel like decisions. They were things I felt I knew about myself.

When I was getting my B.Sc in Psychology, I added things to my mental list of future parenthood.

I would practice attachment parenting, because I learned in Interpersonal Relations and Emotions classes how vital a secure attachment is to a person’s future happiness.

I would use babytalk (sorry, “parentese” :-p) with my baby, and sign language, because Psycholinguistics taught me that they actually speed up language development.

Watching a parent in a store, I would think about how I would deal with a discipline problem, using methods I had learned from Behaviour Modification.

Now I am a parent, and so are some of my friends.

And it can get awkward.

We see reflections of ourselves in the people around us

People feel very personal about their parenting decisions.

Everyone wants to be a good parent (I hope). No one wants to believe that they might be doing things wrong, and yet that fear lurks beneath the surface of every truly good parent. For that reason, people tend to get violently defensive of their own parenting techniques.

So I tread on eggshells.

I nod and smile when people suggest letting my baby cry it out, rather than lecture them about attachment styles. I downplay my use of the cloth diapers. Instead of talking to them about links to asthma, and low sperm counts, I tell them that “it’s laziness, really”, because the diaper service will deliver diapers to my house.

I don’t want to hurt my friends by suggesting that they did things wrong by letting their child cry it out, or by using disposable diapers. I don’t think they did do anything wrong. I just know I don’t want to do it.

Many of my friends are excellent parents whom I admire very much, and these little things are very minor in comparison to the many other things they do as parents that I wholeheartedly agree with. Some of them made those choices many years ago, when there was less information on the subject. So I don’t tell them why I make the choices that I make, in case they feel like I am lecturing them or implying that they did things wrong.

Doing this goes against my natural instincts, because I am a lecturer by nature. However, I was blessed with a friend of lesser intelligence when I was younger, and the hurt she invariably felt whenever I lost patience with her taught me the beginnings of self-censorship. I still don’t always know when to shut up, but I’m better than I used to be, and I know that parents don’t take lectures on parenting styles sitting down.

So I shut up, but sometimes it is really hard.

The other night, when a friend offered me her DVD for infants, which she referred to as “baby crack” I had to think fast to turn it down politely. I had an idea that a reflexive “Oh, HELL no, why don’t you just offer him some methamphetamines while you’re at it?” would not be a well-received response. This is a kind and intelligent person who doesn’t deserve that kind of rudeness.

I suppose I could have just accepted it from her and just never played it for Babby, but then she might have asked me how Babby liked it, and if I had been amused by it myself, and that could have started a whole web of lies. So I summoned every bit of tact I had and said,

“Thank you, but we have a DVD of original sesame street, and that’s enough for now.” I neglected to mention that there’s no way Babby is watching that before age two or three, either. I resisted adding that we don’t want Babby watching TV because pediatricians recommend absolutely no television before age two. I just said no thank you, and hinted that Babby was watching other things.

I feel bad, as if I had lied to my friend, because in a way I did lie. I misled her to think that I was not opposed to DVDs for infants, and that I had my own collection of such things. On the one hand, I spared her feelings and avoided insulting her own parenting choices. I feel that this was the right thing to do.

On the other hand, she babysits for us sometimes, and so I feel like I have delayed the inevitable… unless I want to take the risk that some day she will play “baby crack” for my own child… something I’m sure she wouldn’t do if she knew that it was against my rules. But if I tell her my rules, I’ll be risking making her angry and hurt.

What do you do, when someone suggests something for your child which violates your parenting beliefs? Conversely, what do you do if someone lectures you on your own?

I was speaking to Perfect Girlfriend the other day on the phone through my snuffles and wheezes, and she worried out loud about the swine flu, since BC has more than its fair share of cases. We started talking about the vaccine, and I mentioned that there has been a vaccine out for dogs for months.

“For dogs. For DOGS?” exclaimed the aspiring doctor, “We’re still waiting on it for people, but dogs get one?”

That’s the thing, though. Dogs get all kinds of stuff that people don’t. Animal science, in a lot of ways, is much further advanced than people science, simply because it’s easier to approve medication and testing for dogs than it is for people. If another thalidomide thing happens, but to dogs, people don’t lose as much sleep at night.

For example, take Anipryl. Generically named deprenyl, this drug has been around since the seventies. They use it for Parkinson’s and depression in people. But in dogs, they use it for Cushing’s disease and for senility. That’s right. In dogs, cognitive dysfunction closely resembles Alzheimer’s in humans (similar plaques on the brain) and they have a treatment for it, which works. The creator of the company which makes Anipryl is actually a Parkinson’s patient/researcher who thought that deprenyl was the most miraculous drug evar. He found that preliminary studies showed that it actually reduces the overall effects of aging. That’s right, it’s a life-extender. It actually makes animals live longer, although apparently it mostly works on male rats rather than females. Something to do with dopamine? I dunno.

Anyway, the FDA was having none of it so he founded the veterinary drug company because they CAN use it on dogs. They have been treating dog Alzheimer’s (it’s VERY common in older dogs) with this drug since 1992. It’s still not approved for use in humans for Alzheimer’s, although studies keep going on indicating that it really might help people too, and I think some doctors are beginning to use it as off-label use.

So your dog can have its senility cured, but your grandmother? Not so much.

Then there’s the DHA thing. Recently, everyone’s been talking about DHA. Recent studies have revealed that DHA is even better than Mozart for making babies smarter. Mothers who take DHA supplements (usually cod liver oil – remember your mother forcing that stuff down your throat? Blech) during pregnancy end up with babies whose IQs are higher, who are better at problem solving, and have better hand-eye coordination. Suddenly scientists realize that there is DHA in breast milk but not in formula, and they are now thinking that this explains why breast-fed babies tend to be 6-10 IQ points higher than formula fed babies. So of course now formulas are rushing to add it and advertise it.

The pet industry has known about DHA for forever. Iams has been boasting about it in their commercials recently, that they have the “smart puppy” omega-3 supplements in their puppy food, but actually, the veterinary diets have put DHA in their food for a long, long, time. This is one of the many reasons why I made a point of feeding my Beloved Dog a veterinary diet when he was a puppy just five short years ago… and then resolved to take omega 3 supplements when I was pregnant!

Then Iams started adding it in their food and doing a bunch of studies which they published with much noise and clamour, duplicating what the Waltham Centre and Hill’s had found out long before: puppies whose mothers ate DHA enriched food while pregnant ended up doing much better on intelligence tests. For example, 68% of DHA enriched puppies were able to learn to recognize symbols which indicated the direction to go in order to find food, while only 30% of non-enriched puppies could do that. Studies also found out long ago that DHA was essential for proper eye development in rats.

And it’s not like they didn’t connect it with humans. They did. Notice that this abstract is from 1980. I wasn’t even born yet. But do you see how cautious they’re being? Basically they’re saying “So, apparently fatty acids are associated with bigger brained babies. Interesting.” Why weren’t companies like Similac looking into this thirty years ago? I don’t know why it took thirty years for them to start advertising it to the world at large, but I know one thing – the veterinary industry knew it, and took advantage of it without any qualms.

Hell, even pregnant mothers know this instinctively. When Perfect Girlfriend was pregnant, she developed cravings for seafood. It was like her body was saying “give us the fish oil! BABBY NEEDS FISH OIL.” But instead, thanks to our throwing mercury about recklessly and poisoning our waters, mothers are advised to avoid eating too much fish during pregnancy.

Anyway, my point is, when it comes to the cutting edge of science research – your vet hears it first.